The Guest Ring

The habitat has a name in the language of the people who built it. It does not transliterate — the Archive's note says the difficulty is not the sounds but that the construction is not a name in the sense the register has a column for — and the Celtic Union registry accordingly lists it under the working description that the yard crews used while it was being assembled.

Eighty years later, the Guest Ring is what everybody calls it, including its occupants, who have never been asked whether they mind and have never raised it.

What It Is

A Federation of Sentient Beings habitat in a high orbit above Drithane, and the other half of the instrument described at Greenward. The Union issued the invitation; the Star Rangers brokered it, having nothing of their own to offer.

Its interior is not a place a human can enter without preparation, and the reverse is equally true, which is the plain fact underneath the instrument's non-descent clause and the reason that clause has never once been tested. Drithane below is cold and clear-skied and would kill the Ring's occupants in a way that has nothing to do with anybody's permission.

They watch it anyway. Twice each of Drithane's years the planet crosses the Bríd System's debris band and the drithle run — silent sparks the length of the night sky — and the Ring's observation gallery is oriented for it. This was not in the specification. It was added during construction, by the yard crews, on their own initiative, and the amendment is in the Union file with no explanation attached to it.

The Asymmetry From This Side

Greenward's entry sets out three ways the instrument is less symmetrical than it reads. The Ring's file adds a fourth that only shows from here.

Greenward's people are visitors to a world with a government. The Ring's are visitors to a world with several. Drithane is a Celtic Union charter world, and the Union is a union — the invitation came from an institution, but the Ring sits above communities that did not each get a say. There has never been an objection on the record. There has also never been a mechanism for one, which is a different thing, and the Union's own registrar has noted the difference twice.

What is not on the file, anywhere, is what the Federation makes of the arrangement. The Archive holds the Federation's minute of the founding session and nothing since. It has not asked, on the reasoning that a party which has raised no difficulty in eighty years is entitled to be taken at its silence — and it records that reasoning rather than the conclusion, because an unasked question is not an answer.

Why It Has Never Been Withdrawn

Either party may withdraw the invitation on notice, without cause. Neither has, and the standing explanation on the Union side is that nothing has happened to warrant it.

The Ring's presence has outlasted four Union administrations, two Ranger High Captains, and one period of considerable Union bad temper about an unrelated Federation decision — during which withdrawal was raised in council, debated in a single afternoon, and dropped. The minute records the argument that carried: that the instrument's whole value is that it is not contingent on the parties getting on, and that a thing kept only while it is comfortable was never worth having.

The same afternoon produced the observation most often quoted from it, and the Union has never established who said it, the minute being a summary. We did not invite them here because we liked them. We invited them so that liking them would stop being the question.

See also: Habitats and the Worlds Beneath Them, Greenward, Drithane, The Federation of Sentient Beings, The Celtic Union of Planets, Marked Absences.